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to give the old grey matter a workout.

There's nothing new to find either - almost from the first level you're introduced to practically all your enemies and their weapons. Unlike other games of this type, you don't encounter new weapons later in the game, and it's strange that Bungie chose to give you access to most stuff from the early parts of the game.

Performance.

For a game that's a few years old, the performance issue was quite worrying. I wasn't playing with all the options turned up to full, but there was still a significant amount of slowdown in places despite the fact my processor speed is just short of 4 times the minimum speed, coupled with a brand new graphics card and lots of memory.

Microsoft's Minimum Specifications:
Operating System: Any Microsoft Operating system EXCEPT Windows 95 or Windows NT.
Processor: 733 MHz processor.
DirectX 9.0 or later and is included with Halo.
Memory: 128 MB of RAM.
Hard Disk: 1.2 GB of hard disk space.
Video card: 32 MB with 3D Transform and Lighting capable.
Sound: Standard soundcard.

My Specifications (where different):
Processor: 2500 MHz processor
Memory: 512 MB
Video Card: 256MB Radeon 9600 XT

Overall.
Good graphics and sound are icing on the cake, not something to build an entire game around. I was dreadfully disappointed by Halo - three out of the five main 'pieces' (sound, plot and graphics) are excellent, but Halo fails spectacularly on the one piece where it really counts, namely gameplay. The multiplayer was fun for a very short time, but not enough to have me going back anymore than a few times.

On a positive note, there is so much back story to Halo that there are novels out which deal with the Halo universe and can be found on Amazon. "Halo: The Fall of Reach", for example, deals with the events leading up to the start of the game and there are others which cover events during and after the game.

There are plenty of sources of information on the game on the internet (try the unofficial http://halo.bungie.org/ for in-depth analyses of aspects of the Halo universe), and to be honest, if you're interested in the Halo universe, I'd have a look at those. If you are, then perhaps you'd be better spending four pounds on one of the books than thirty quid on the game. If the plot fails to excite you, then you may look elsewhere because it's the only reason to play this game.

Learn more about this author, The Duke.
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